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Trust, Global Traders, and Commodities in a Chinese International City

Welcome to TRODITIES’ blog. (TRODITIES is an acronym of the project). The idea behind this blog is somewhat experimental. It is a resource with a dual function. On the one hand, it can be read as an ordinary ‘activities’ rubric, it outlines project news and events. In the long run this activities’ rubric will transform into a project archive that, among other things, would allow us to fill in the annual project’s activities reports with least time expenditure. On the other hand, it also attempts to achieve something else: We envision it as an information resource that would allow the public – both our students, students and scholars in our research destinations, and general public – to have insights into the ‘social life’ of a collective research project. In other words, insights into what it means in practice to carry out an international project of this scale, with participants dispersed between different countries, institutions and university departments, what kind of issues we discuss, where and how we do it, what kinds of field research we do, what kind of papers we give, what kind of practical and other problems we face, and so on – and how all these various activities, both carefully planned and spontaneous, eventually result in something called ‘project objectives’ and ‘project outputs’. To this end, the language of the blog is intentionally as jargon free as possible and entries as heterogeneous as possible. The direct feedback/comment function of the blog is disabled here for administrative reasons, but the reader will know how to contact us.

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Blog Entries

While conducting research for the TRODITIES project in China, Afghanistan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine I regularly meet traders from Afghanistan who talk about their willingness to do business in the UK.
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"Persian New Year in Yiwu and Iranian Special Tea in Karachi" by Magnus Marsden. One of my most memorable evenings while conducting fieldwork in Yiwu in 2016 fell on 20th March, the evening of Nowruz, Persian New Year. Having put my three-year-old son to bed and waited for my wife to return from her Chinese language classes it was often a part of my fieldwork routine to have a beer in one of the two ramshackle bars popular with foreign traders that were located in Yiwu’s Maida area.
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"A drive through north western Afghanistan" by Magnus Marsden. I am often asked what it is like to do fieldwork in Afghanistan. To give a sense of doing fieldwork in the country today, I provide an account of a two-day trip in the northwest of the country that I made in October 2017.
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